Posts Tagged “Jyllands-Posten”

The exterior of a building housing the Jyllands-Posten Copenhagen office is seen. Four Swedes accused of plotting a revenge attack on the Jyllands-Posten newspaper that printed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad have gone on trial

A Danish court has sentenced four men to 12 years in prison each for plotting a gun attack on a newspaper in revenge for its 2005 publication of cartoons purporting to portray the Prophet Muhammad.

The authorities have described the planned attack as the most serious terrorist plot ever uncovered in Denmark.

The men, three Swedish citizens and a Tunisian, were arrested in December 2010, just hours before the alleged attack was to take place.

The men had pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The court in Glostrup, near Copenhagen, on June 4 also ordered the men to be expelled from Denmark after they serve their sentences.

Prosecutors said the men had intended to cause heavy loss of life by opening fire on the offices of the “Jyllands-Posten” newspaper the same day that Crown Prince Frederik was due to visit the paper’s building in Copenhagen.

A fitting end to this story, but I cannot help but think there will be more terrorist attacks based on the Muhammed Cartoons.

Blaming the publication of these images of Muhammed offer a convenient excuse or cover for Islamic terrorist activities.

The exterior of a building housing the Jyllands-Posten Copenhagen office is seen. Four Swedes accused of plotting a revenge attack on the Jyllands-Posten newspaper that printed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad have gone on trial

Four men went on trial in Denmark on Friday accused of planning a “Mumbai-style” terror attack on the offices of a Danish newspaper whose publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad in 2005 outraged many Muslims.

The men, three Swedish citizens and one Tunisian, pleaded not guilty to involvement in the worst terrorist plot in Denmark to date, denying allegations they had planned to kill a large number of people at the offices of the paper, Jyllands-Posten.

“It is our perception that an unknown number of people were to be killed by shooting,” Chief Prosecutor Gyrithe Ulrich told TV2 News outside the courthouse in Glostrup, near Copenhagen.

Jyllands-Posten was the first to print a dozen cartoons lampooning Islam in 2005, triggering protests against Danish interests abroad and riots in countries from the Middle East and Africa to Asia the following year in which at least 50 people died.

Denmark’s state security police (PET) has said the planned attack was modelled on a 2008 shooting spree in Mumbai, when 10 Pakistani gunmen killed 166 people in a three-day assault at city landmarks, including two hotels and a Jewish centre.

The men belonged to a militant Islamist group and had links to international terrorist networks, the PET has said.

The four were arrested in a joint Danish-Swedish police operation in the suburbs of Copenhagen and Stockholm on Dec. 29, 2010. Police, who had been tracking the men for some time, have said that the attack was imminent “within days”.

All four pleaded not guilty to the main charge of terrorism, but Dhari pleaded guilty to the charge of illegally possessing weapons, which the others denied.

The Court of First Instance of Mahdia sentenced two men to seven years of prison for charges relating to their posting of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed on Facebook. The decision is subject to appeal.

According to an extract of the decision, which was posted online, Jabeur Mejri and Ghazi Beji were sentenced to five years in prison for “troubling the public” order and “transgressing morality” by posting the images of the Prophet and an additional two for “bringing harm to others” across “networks of public communications.” The two men were each levied a fine of 1,200 dinars as well.

Beji has fled to Europe to avoid facing charges while Mejri is currently in jail in Mahdia and studying his appeal with his legal representation.

Bochra Belhaj Hmida, lawyer, activist, and ex-president of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, is currently involved in an effort to rally civil society against the decision. She stated that she found the decision shocking, particularly, “when one considers the fact that those in Tunisia who committed terrorist acts are free and those two men are being prosecuted for publishing such insignificant things.”

But, then again, most of the American press were afraid to post these cartoons or caricatures as well.

I wonder what my sentence would be, since I have posted them over and over?

Here is Kurt Westergaard’s most famous cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad:

Courtroom sketch by artist Marco Vaglieri shows Mikael Davud in an Oslo court Monday Jan. 30 2012. Davud was sentenced to seven years in prison for planning to bomb the Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten that caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, the first convictions under Norway’s anti-terror laws. The Oslo district court sentenced alleged ringleader Davud, to seven years in prison and co-defendant Shawan Sadek Saeed Bujak to three and a half years.(AP Photo / Marco Vaglieri, Scanpix)

Two men were found guilty Monday of involvement in an al-Qaida plot to attack a Danish newspaper that caricatured the Prophet Muhammad, the first convictions under Norway’s anti-terror laws.

A third defendant was acquitted of terror charges but convicted of helping the others acquire explosives.

Investigators say the plot was linked to the same al-Qaida planners behind thwarted attacks against the New York subway system and a shopping mall in Manchester, England, in 2009.

The Oslo district court sentenced alleged ringleader Mikael Davud, to seven years in prison and co-defendant Shawan Sadek Saeed Bujak to three and a half years.

Judge Oddmund Svarteberg said the court found that Davud, a Chinese Muslim, “planned the attack together with al-Qaida.” Bujak was deeply involved in the preparations, but it couldn’t be proved that he was aware of Davud’s contacts with al-Qaida, the judge said.

The third defendant, David Jakobsen, who assisted police in the investigation, was convicted on an explosives charge and sentenced to four months in prison — time he’s already served in pretrial detention.

Defense lawyers for the three told the court they would study the verdict before deciding whether to appeal.

Scores of officers conducted the raid, removing the tents and clearing the area.

On Tuesday, more than 1,200 singing, sign-waving students and faculty members rallied for much of the day on Sproul Plaza, a site of the 1960s Free Speech Movement.

At one point, the demonstrators chanted “Hey, hey, ho, ho, police violence has got to go,” a reference to an incident last week in which baton-wielding police officers stopped an Occupy camp from being set up on the campus. Dozens of protesters were arrested in last week’s confrontation, and several were injured.

The march, which is timed to coincide with other demonstrations across the country to protest the imbalance of wealth and power in the country, is set to begin at 7 a.m. at Bank of America Plaza on Hope Street. It will then make its way through the Financial District to the corner of Figueroa and 4th streets, where demonstrators plan to shut down traffic by erecting tents in the middle of the street.

Jacob Hay, a leader of the coalition of labor and community groups that helped organize the march, said the group has secured police permits, but that protesters are prepared to be arrested for blocking traffic.

In a letter to Pelosi (D-Calif.) obtained by The Hill, the Texas governor wrote: “I am in Washington Monday and would love to engage you in a public debate about my Overhaul Washington plan versus the congressional status quo.

“I think it would be a tremendous service to the American people to see a public airing of these differences,” he continued. “Let the people decide. If Monday doesn’t work, perhaps we could find a time in Iowa over the course of the next month to discuss these issues in front of the people of America’s heartland.”

It took about 40 police officers in riot gear nearly four hours to clear the bank, but no one was injured. Police said many of those arrested were UC Santa Cruz students who were protesting fee increases and budget cuts.

Police removed the protesters methodically, placing them in plastic handcuffs, citing them for misdemeanor trespassing and sending them off in police wagons for further processing.

Wall Street clashes start Occupy’s day of action – Police arrested protesters who sat on the ground and blocked traffic into New York’s financial district on Thursday, part of a day of mass gatherings in response to efforts to break up Occupy Wall Street camps nationwide.

Police in riot helmets hauled several protesters to their feet and handcuffed them one block from Wall Street.

As the city braced for a “sizeable” crowd, observers on both sides said the scale of the protest would show whether the two-month-old movement could regain momentum after Tuesday’s demoralizing defeat.

OWS hoped anger over the NYPD raid that razed their iconic tent city at Zuccotti Park would breathe new life into a cause that had begun to sputter.

The “day of action” is to begin early, with protesters converging on Wall Street camouflaged in business suits hoping to blend in with office workers trooping out of the subway.

Nkrumah Tinsley, 29, was busted after cops saw a video of him claiming he would torch the city during Thursday’s mass protest posted online, police said.

“On the 17th (of Nov.), we’re going to burn New York City to the f—ing ground,” an angry Tinsley told a crowd of demonstrators in the video posted on Tuesday.

“In a few days, you’re going to see what a Molotov cocktail can do to Macy’s.”

When officers from the NYPD’s intelligence division saw the video, they immediately began working on trying to identify the raging man, police said.

“We didn’t want him out there [Thursday]. We wanted him in our custody,” said Paul Browne, top spokesman for the NYPD. “He was specific as to date, location and method for the fire bombing …maybe it was just a rant, but we didn’t want to take that chance.”

Cops later spotted Tinsley at Zuccotti Park Wednesday and collared him about 5 p.m., police said. He was charged with making terroristic threats.

Romenesko Leaves Poynter After Conflict Over Quotes – Jim Romenesko, the blogger who developed a large and loyal following by chronicling and summarizing news in the media world, quit his post on Thursday evening after a bizarre spat with the institute that hosts his writing.

An editor at Poynter, which purchased Mr. Romenesko’s blog 12 years ago, had questioned his failure to use quotation marks when summarizing articles in his daily round-ups of media stories — summaries that Mr. Romenesko never claimed credit for as his original work.

In an e-mail to the institute on Thursday night, Mr. Romenesko said, “I’ve had a great dozen years at Poynter, and I look forward to my next chapter.”

Felix • A couple of points about Romeneskogate, for those who aren’t completely bored of it by now – The original Julie Moos post was highly misleading in one respect — she made it seem as though Romenesko hadn’t blockquoted two full paragraphs in this post, when in fact he had used blockquote. I know Moos was misleading because Jack Shafer said that she “pointed to a recent example from Romenesko’s work in which he ran whole sentences from a Chicago Tribune story in his summary of it without placing the words in quotation marks or block quotation”. I suspect that the problem here is that Poynter’s CSS has problems with blockquotes-within-blockquotes, but in any case Moos should have been much clearer that only a minority of the text in question was outside quote marks or blockquotes.
Justin Peters managed to commit exactly the same sin that Moos did, when he reminisced about freelancing on Today’s Papers. “I knuckled down and found a way to say things in my own words, because I am a journalist, and that is my job,” he writes, managing to to completely miss the point of what an aggregator does. It’s not the job of a journalist, saying things in his own words: instead, it’s the job of a curator, linking to great content. If Peters thinks that Romenesko’s job was that of a journalist, writing things in his own words, he’s missing the point entirely.

Holding aggregators to journalistic standards – Moos is using the standards of original journalism, here, to judge a blogger who was never about original journalism. Copy-and-pasting other people’s stories is what Romenesko did, at high volume, and with astonishing speed and reliability, for many years. And the media community, including Poynter, loved him for it.

Moos might have “spent weeks in 2004 developing explicit publishing guidelines with the understanding and expectation that they would be adopted”, but guidelines are always reverse-engineered from already-existing best practice. And Romenesko is a shining example of best practice in the aggregation world. If he’s violating the guidelines, then it’s the guidelines which are at fault, not Romenesko.

Petty bureaucrats like Moos love to codify things, so that they can cite chapter and verse when telling people off. But if you’re running a grown-up media organization, please: follow Paton’s lead, and not Moos’s. Journalists will behave unethically, sometimes. When they do, they should be reprimanded or even fired. But basic common sense is always the best guide to whether a journalist has done something wrong. And when Julie Moos presumes to judge Jim Romenesko by the standards of a Moos-written rulebook, it’s right and proper that the wrath of the Twittersphere come down on her as a result.

But Walker doesn’t appear to be backing off one inch from his stance that he did what was right for his state.

Indeed, in a conversation with Tell Me More host Michel Martin, Walker essentially blamed outside agitators in organized labor for the recall effort.

He accused his political foes of really being after “power” while presumably camouflaging their true intent with platitudes about workers’ rights, among other things.

Unions are in particular coming after him, Walker said, because the new budget law he and the the Republican-controlled state legislature in Madison enacted, gave workers a choice about whether or not to belong to a union.

“You must understand: to Republican stalwarts, a relationship with Freddie Mac is the moral equivalent of satanism. Gingrich was a paid helper — and, believe me, he didn’t get paid $1.6 million to lecture the organization on the failures of government intervention in the market — in a ‘socialist’ effort to make home-buying easier for people who ordinarily wouldn’t be able to afford houses, an effort that famously went off the rails when the government began supporting sub-prime and other highly questionable mortgages.”

“In other words, Gingrich was supporting — the best guess was that Gingrich was hired to win some Republican support for Freddie — the very sort of program that he routinely excoriates. This sort of hypocrisy is astounding but, sadly, not unknown to Newt. After all, this was the guy who led the Republican Impeachment of Bill Clinton while having an extra-marital affair of his own.”

The total amount is significantly larger than the $300,000 payment from Freddie Mac that Gingrich was asked about during a Republican presidential debate on Nov. 9 sponsored by CNBC, and more than was disclosed in the middle of congressional investigations into the housing industry collapse.

Gingrich’s business relationship with Freddie Mac spanned a period of eight years. When asked at the debate what he did to earn a $300,000 payment in 2006, the former speaker said he “offered them advice on precisely what they didn’t do,” and warned the company that its lending practices were “insane.” Former Freddie Mac executives who worked with Gingrich dispute that account.

Gingrich’s first contract with the mortgage lender was in 1999, five months after he resigned from Congress and as House speaker, according to a Freddie Mac press release.

His primary contact inside the organization was Mitchell Delk, Freddie Mac’s chief lobbyist, and he was paid a self- renewing, monthly retainer of $25,000 to $30,000 between May 1999 until 2002, according to three people familiar with aspects of the business agreement.

Terror three plead not guilty – 38-year-old Iraqi-Kurd Shawan Sadek Saeed Bujak, Uzbek David Jakobsen, 33, and alleged Uighur (China) mastermind 40-year-old Mikael Davud, pleaded not guilty to planning an assault using explosives on Danish paper Jyllands-Posten at today’s opening of their trial in Oslo District Court.
All also denied their guilt relating to charges of trying to obtain bomb ingredients, as well as plotting to assassinate Danish cartoonist and author of the contentious Prophet Mohammed caricatures, Kurt Westergaard.
Police Security Service (PST) officials arrested now indicted Bujak, Jakobsen, and Davud in Norway and Germany last year on suspicion of planning to blow up the Chinese Embassy in Oslo.
The case is also believed to be connected with plans to bomb a New York subway and a shopping mall in Manchester, UK, in 2009.
According to NRK, Prosecutor Geir Evanger said today that, “There is no doubt that David Jakobsen ordered hydrogen peroxide at a pharmacy on Jernbanetorget [in Oslo] on 02 September 2009. There is [also] no doubt that this can be used to make explosives.”
“He picked it up on 04 September, and the bottle was handed over to Mikael Davud in his Oslo apartment the same evening. However, police had already replaced the contents of the bottle contents with something harmless,” he continued.
All three men also have suspected links with al-Qaida. Officials believe Mr Davud had travelled to Pakistan and was trained by the extremist group how to make explosives, as well as agreeing he would commit acts of terror.
“He made a deal with Bujak and Jakobsen to hit Jyllands-Posten’s offices when he came back to Norway,” alleged Geir Evanger.

The trial of Mikael Davud, Shawan Sadek Saeed Bujak and David Jakobsen is being seen as a key test of Norway’s anti-terror laws. The men had been under surveillance for more than a year when authorities moved to arrest them in July 2010.

Norwegian investigators, who worked with their U.S. counterparts, say the defendants were building a bomb in a basement laboratory — a plot linked to the same al-Qaida planners behind 2009 schemes to blow up New York’s subway and a British shopping mall.

The men deny the terror charges. Prosecutors must prove they worked together in a conspiracy, because a single individual plotting an attack is not covered by Norway’s anti-terror laws.

Prosecutor Geir Evanger told the Oslo district court that Davud, the alleged ringleader, received explosives training in Pakistan. They said he conspired with al-Qaida operatives to attack the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper, whose 12 cartoons of Muhammad triggered furious protests in Muslim countries in 2006.

Herdt: Opportunity knocks; is anyone home? – In the national struggle for control of Congress next year, both Democrats and Republicans acknowledge that Ventura County’s new 26th Congressional District will be an important battlefield.

It has all the key elements: voter registration that is closely divided, a healthy percentage of independents and a history of split results.

It has all the elements, that is, except for this: very few warriors.

There are two announced Democratic candidates, Moorpark City Councilman David Pollock and Westlake Village businessman David Cruz Thayne. Most observers are waiting for another to emerge — Supervisor Steve Bennett, or perhaps Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, or perhaps some other surprise candidate with proven fundraising ability.

There are no announced Republican candidates because everyone is waiting on Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Simi Valley, to publicly reveal his intentions.

The growing frustration over that uncertainty last week led Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Santa Clarita, to issue what appeared to be a calculated poke at Gallegly to make up his mind. McKeon told his hometown newspaper that “as near as I can pin him down,” Gallegly intends to run in the 25th District against McKeon.

Gallegly actually lives in the 25th District, but his Simi Valley home is only a couple hundred yards from the boundary, and most of the 26th District is made up of areas he now represents. As long as the 26th District remains an option for Gallegly, other Republicans are frozen out by the political protocol that frowns on challenging an incumbent in a primary.